The constant connections and disconnections of a mobile device to services and entities within a telecommunication and/or data network increase the amount of signaling network traffic within that network, which lowers the performance of the network overall. This imposes a burden upon network operators that forces them to increase bandwidth and network access.
It is very common for a mobile device to be receiving data from multiple sources (e.g., servers, web-sites, nodes of a network, etc.) in the service network. Smart phones, for example, may run several applications in parallel, and each application may engage in a periodic or non-periodic handshake with a network server, such as to check to see if there is any content to be downloaded to the mobile device or uploaded from the mobile device, to determine whether the connection between the mobile device and server should still be maintained, and so on.
In some circumstances, these handshaking interactions have little or no value to a user, such as when the user is not currently engaged in active use of the device, e.g., when the screen is dark or when the device is lying unused in a purse or backpack. Even when the user is actively using the device, an application on the device that continually polls a server to determine if there is content, such as text messages, email, etc., available may generate needless traffic if there is no content for the mobile device/user of that device.
In addition, such transactions typically put the mobile device radio in a high-power mode for a considerable length of time—typically between 15-30 seconds. As the high-power mode can consume as much as 100× the power as an idle mode, these network-initiated applications are power hungry and can quickly drain the battery. The issue has been exacerbated by the rapid increase of the popularity of applications with network-initiated functionalities, such as push email, news feeds, status updates, multimedia content sharing and other mobile applications, etc. Furthermore, the problem with constant polling is that mobile phones also rely on signaling to send and receive calls and SMS messages and sometimes these basic mobile functions are forced to take a backseat to unruly applications and other mobile clients.
Thus, not only do these transactions consume battery power of the device—e.g., to activate an otherwise dormant radio transceiver circuit—the traffic so generated by these handshaking transactions consumes wireless bandwidth, such as between the mobile device and the cell tower, for example.
Therefore, in light of these disadvantages associated with conventional interactions between applications residing on a mobile device and the network entities with which the mobile device and its applications may interact, there is a need to optimize or reduce this kind of traffic. More specifically, there is a need for distributed caching systems with configurable extended caching optimization.